THE CHRONIC MIASMS


A drug proving is a living picture of the autonomic response to the drug which is being proved. A patients symptoms are a living picture of the autonomic effort to recover. To find a method of curing, it is certainly better to use the evidences of the efforts of the living body to cure itself than the pathological evidences, which represent failure of recovery.


Hahnemanns Organon is based on deductions which he made concerning the significance of a patients symptoms; the relation to them of a curative drug, and his observation that drugs act best when highly diluted. If valid, all of his deductions must be based on natural laws; for instance, the symptom picture of the patient must be based on the laws of physiology and potentisation on physical laws.

A drug proving is a living picture of the autonomic response to the drug which is being proved. A patients symptoms are a living picture of the autonomic effort to recover. To find a method of curing, it is certainly better to use the evidences of the efforts of the living body to cure itself than the pathological evidences, which represent failure of recovery.

METHODS OF RESEARCH.

When the Foundation for Homoeopathic Research was organised twenty years ago, nothing was recognised in physical science that explained the action of high potencies. For this reason, potentisation was selected for our first field of research. The records are full of human provings but these were not acceptable to unbelievers, so to eliminate all psychic factors, guinea-pigs1 and fruit-flies2 were used in these experiments. Profound effects occurred in both the fruit-flies and the guinea-pigs, thus confirming, in accord with modern standards, that high potencies do cause effects on living things.

The next step resulted from the findings of the Committee3 appointed by the International Hahnemannian Association in 1922 to investigate Abrams work. The writer was made chairman of this committee. Two members of it, Drs. Becker and Woodbury, had already been at Abrams clinic. Another member, Dr. Eugene Underhill, and the writer spent a month at his clinic and the writer also visited in Los Angeles. Dr. George Starr White, who, earlier than Abrams, discovered that the body responds to orientation and that energy from one person can be conducted to another by means of a wire and will cause a dulling of the percussion note on certain parts of the second persons body. White was using these and other phenomena in diagnosis and treatment.

This committee was active for several years, constantly experimenting as well as investigating. It verified the claim that the autonomic mechanism of our bodies reacts to orientation, to the near presence of another person, to a drop of another persons blood, even when dried on a blotter; that the reactions are different if the donor of the blood is diseased than if he is well and that there is a form of energy in the blood which can be tuned in a suitable circuit and that the tunings have a diagnostic value.

It also observed that potentised drugs affect autonomic reactions, even at a distance, and the more homoeopathic a drug is to the individual the greater the distance at which its influence is noticed. If it be a similimum, it annuals the tuning effect mentioned above. Thus, through this committee work, a kindly fate had shown the way for the further work of the Foundation.

The pupils4, the heart and body tonus are under autonomic control and anyone who has sufficient skill in percussing to map the heart border on the chest or to count the pulse and recognise a change in its quality or can observe changes in the size of the pupils can verify these effects.

In confirming some of the claims of Abrams, we do not endorse the name “electronic” in relation to the phenomena. From physics there is no evidence of this claim. Nevertheless, physics, by such devices as the Wilson cloud chamber, is capable of virtual observation of single electrons. The movement of electrons results in the flow of electrical currents. Nothing in the Abrams phenomena suggests a relationship with electricity. In fact, between these phenomena and electricity the outstanding characteristic is not their similarity but their difference.

Since then, our research has been directed to finding the nature of matter which has been diluted beyond the theoretical electronic limits and to finding as many ways as possible by which the autonomic mechanism of the body is affected by potentised drugs and to determining the most practical and accurate method of utilising these effects5. Experimenting along this line has allowed us greatly to enlarge our list of drugs without the long labor of proving. For instance, instead of having six Calcareas, we have forty. Instead of having a few nosodes, we have over one hundred and fifty and instead of only a few snake venoms, we have more than a hundred. We have, from time to time, called attention to new drugs and to a more extended use of some of our old drugs. In this paper, we will discuss Hahnemanns concept of chronic diseases in accord with the results of our work.

HAHNEMANNS CHRONIC MIASMS.

Of Hahnemanns three chronic miasms, syphilis and sycosis are verifiable today by any school of practice. The two groups of drugs covering them are as valuable and as specific as when Hahnemann called attention to them. As regards psora, his assertion that “at least seven-eighths of the presently existing chronic maladies originate in the reckless suppression of the chief external symptoms of psora”, was a broad generalisation. His error was in combining a disease name and an aspect of disease expression in the one word “psora”.

To Hahnemann all languages were as one, and he selected “psora” from the Greek as the best word to express his thought. When he started that itch, a parasitic disease, and leprosy, a chronic bacillus infection, were manifestations of the same miasm, he was referring to their expression in skin lesions.

The idea of suppression should be enlarged to include not only suppression of eruptions but the suppression of every other type of symptom. In practice, we should think only of encouraging, by means of the Law of Similars, all natural expressions of reaction.

Our work confirms Herings suggestion that appears in his introduction to Hahnemanns Chronic Diseases, translated by Charles J. Hempel, as follows:.

Upon the same ground that Hahnemann acknowledged as standing and independent diseases the acute miasms, known as purpura, measles, scarlatina, smallpox, whooping-cough, etc., or that he distinguished the venereal miasm into syphilis and sycosis, we may afterwards, if experience should demand it, subdivide psora into several species and varieties.

If we were seeking a striking example of psora and its suppression as described by Hahnemann we would take the alternation between certain skin eruptions and asthmatic outbreaks. When asthma is present, patients are sent to the appropriate clinic and the asthmatic attacks are brought under control. With the disappearance of asthma there follows a severe itching eruption on the skin and the patients go to the skin clinic where the skin condition is treated locally but with its disappearance there is a recurrence of the asthmatic trouble.

INFLUENZA MIASM6.

In the break-up of psora into its submiasms, we would classify influenza as one of the most important units. The usual acute form of influenza is well recognized but it has a wide affinity and in its chronic form its manifestations are legion. It often wakes up latent tuberculosis and latent tuberculosis increases the morbidity of influenza. When influenza in its acute form imitates pneumonia, it is especially deadly. In the nervous system it is devastating, as is shown in encephalitis lethargica, but various mild forms of neural influenza may easily be overlooked. The asthenia of its acute form is apt to extend to the chronic form regardless of its type.

It not infrequently localises in the higher centers of the brain, causing a general lowered tone and various types of depression. Look out for the future of those who have delirium or hallucinations during acute influenza. In cardiac conditions, it depresses the heart tone and sets up local irritations, causing extra systoles and lowered blood pressure. “Frequent colds” and general debility are often chronic influenza. It accentuates hyperthyroidism and frequently is its main cause. An epidemic of diarrhoea is occasionally due to an influenza infection. Often the most careful prescribing fails to completely eradicate influenza.

Influenza pandemics occur every thirty years but lesser and milder epidemics occur every winter and some individuals will have more than one attack during the year. Various theories have been advanced as to why, during pandemics, groups of individuals isolated from any source of general infection will be infected. During the 1918 epidemic a fishing boat came into Gloucester flying a distress signal. They had been out at sea for several weeks and yet the whole crew came down with influenza. One possibility is that there are numbers of carriers of chronic influenza and that there is a thirty-year period of increased virulence just as in the history of man a race of people will have a long period of advancement followed by decadence.

The Influenzin nosodes are specific in the chronic form and are the most useful remedies when it is acute. The old Influenzin (Spanish) is indicated in cases that date back several years, but in acute cases or the chronic cases of recent years, but in acute cases or the chronic cases of recent years, Influenzin antitoxin or Influenzin serum are best. Influenzin polyvalent, Influenzin nebel and Influenzin meningeal (Griggs) are at times useful.

TUBERCULOSIS MIASM.

Tubercular miasm may be latent for a lifetime and complicate any acute infection that occurs of whatever type. We place it adjacent to the influenza miasm because we never find acute tuberculosis without an accompanying influenza infection and the patient responds much more promptly if the influenza factor be taken care of first. Hardly any person who lives in a city is free from this miasm though it may not become active as such, but its presence will aggravate any acute condition, especially influenza.

Guy Beckley Stearns